East Africa Tech

Buying, renting, and managing property in East Africa has traditionally been slow, fragmented, and heavily dependent on personal networks: a friend who knows a landlord, an agent who happens to have the right listing, a caretaker collecting rent in cash and recording it in a notebook. Today, a growing number of PropTech platforms are digitising pieces of that process, from property discovery and rental payments to tenant communication and market data. Rapid urbanisation, a growing middle class, persistent housing shortages, and near-universal smartphone adoption are pushing more of that activity online. Real estate remains one of the least digitised major sectors in the region, which is precisely why investors are starting to pay closer attention to the platforms rebuilding it piece by piece. Unlike consumer apps that live or die on constant user acquisition, several of these platforms are building toward the kind of recurring revenue, subscription management fees, transaction commissi...